Municipal parking rules cost projects up to $59,000 per space for an above-ground garage, or as much as $152,000 for each underground parking spot, industry statistics show. iStock photo
As Boston city councilors heard testimony from experts and residents about whether to let developers pick how much parking to build, it was clear two camps are emerging on the hot-button issue.
Councilor Sharon Durkan, who represents Beacon Hill, Back Bay and the Fenway, joined with at-large Councilor Henry Santana and Council President Liz Breadon, who represents Allston-Brighton, to pitch repealing rules that specify the minimum amount of parking a development must include, citywide.
The change would principally benefit small developments, Durkan told councilors during a hearing Thursday, which currently face a set of parking rules that varies from place to place. Testifying Thursday, zoning researcher and former Hartford Planning Board Chair Sarah Bronin called the parking rules, and the larger zoning code they are a part of, “bloated, outdated, inconsistent and inequitable.”
Jesse Kanson-Benanav, executive director of housing advocacy group Abundant Housing MA, told councilors that research shows requiring a surface parking lot in the city of Boston adds around $10,000 to a project’s cost, and can jack up rents by as much as $200 a month in a small development.
“We want to grow our roots here but we can’t afford to size up in our community because, among other reasons, arbitrary parking mandates force land to be used for overbuilt parking instead of families like mine,” he said.
Developers and researchers have previously told Banker & Tradesman that eliminating parking from projects in transit-rich areas can “have a positive impact” on a project’s financial viability.
But even as polling sponsored by Abundant Housing appears to show support for allowing developers “parking flexibility,” some of the councilors in attendance Thursday showed opposition was already forming to the Durkan-Santana-Breadon proposal, which still faces more debate at the City Council before it comes to a vote. Only six of the council’s 13 members were present at Thursday’s hearing.
Councilors Splitting Into Camps
In one camp: Durkan and her co-sponsors and allies, who lauded how eliminating minimum parking requirements citywide would help make more housing developments pencil. The change, already in place in some neighborhoods, wouldn’t result in new developments without parking, and wouldn’t put extra burdens on street parking, they claimed, citing Metropolitan Area Planning Council research that says roughly 3 in 10 off-street parking spots in residential developments citywide go unused, and that new developments without parking tend to attract residents who don’t own cars.
“What we’ve seen is that this will make building housing easier,” said Hyde Park-Roslindale Councilor Enrique Pepén, speaking about recent rezoning moves in Roslindale.
In another camp: South Boston Councilor Ed Flynn, and Dorchester-Mattapan Councilor Brian Worrell and Dorchester Councilor John FitzGerald, who attacked the measure as being developed without input from residents or neighborhood groups. Worrell added that he fears eliminating parking minimums would also eliminate an incentive developers currently have for building all-affordable housing: such projects are exempt from parking requirements citywide.
Flynn describe the measure as an assault on car-owning Bostonians, and appeared to try and characterize it as an effort to eliminate parking in the city, altogether.
“The residents who do need a car can’t be viewed as the enemy. I see these families…they shouldn’t be punished for it,” he said.
In a third camp: councilors like at-large Councilor Ruthzee Louijeunne, who took no clear position, but peppered the hearing’s panelists with questions about what kind of impact the measure would have, and what effort its supporters had put into communicating their ideas.
“When people hear ‘eliminating parking minimums,’ they hear ‘eliminating parking, period.’ Where I disagree is that we [haven’t] done the work to educate people about what’s happening,” she said.
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s chief of planning, Kairos Shen, appears to be in that camp, too. When Durkan pressed him on his opinion on leaving parking decisions up to developers during the Planning Department’s annual budget hearing last month.
“I think ultimately it’s something we’ll arrive at but we’ll do it with the community with us,” he said. “As I said, that knowledge and buy-in and being part of the decision-making, as opposed to this being done by so-called experts not engaged in the daily lives of people living in these communities, is important.”
The city’s process of neighborhood-level rezoning exercises is gradually eliminating parking minimums for smaller projects, but that process has progressed only fitfully.
